


Bedside Confessions

by tjs_whatnot



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-16 00:15:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5805814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tjs_whatnot/pseuds/tjs_whatnot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is nothing like a hospital bed to bring out the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bedside Confessions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onedogtown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onedogtown/gifts).



  
_“If you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for a beer.”  
“If you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for red lights.”_

~oOo~

Donna Moss waited until the waiting room had cleared out as much as it was going to, waited until she was the only one left to sit vigil at Josh’s bedside. They told her that she needn’t bother, that he wouldn’t know she was there, wouldn’t comprehend anything she said.

She was counting on it. 

She could feel the tears sting the back of her eyes as she walked down the hall to his room. She was glad for his not being able to tease her about her sentimentality. Well, not glad exactly. She would have happily put up with all manners of ribbing and mockery if it meant he was up and about and in full use of his faculties. 

She put her hand on the door and took a deep breath, trying to put on her brave face, her light and whimsical face. The one that always seemed to disarm him, made him take stock for a moment of the bigger picture--or the small one, whichever one he hadn’t been manic about at any given moment.

When she opened the door, the first thing that hit her was the smell: bandages, blood and antiseptic. It brought back a childhood memory of sickness and death and Saturday visits to her grandmother and how terrified she had been of her in that bed, withered and panting. She took another deep breath. This wasn’t her grandmother and she wasn’t a scared little girl anymore. This was Josh, and she was _needed_. She walked in and approached him and the machines whining air into his mouth and medicine into his veins, keeping him alive. 

She covered her mouth with a gasp. She had thought she was prepared for what it would be to look over this man who had always seemed unstoppable, an infallible force of nature tougher than anyone she’d ever met and see him broken and crumbled. 

_Two inches and he’d be dead._

She shook her head against the words in her mind. “Not allowed,” she whispered. “You’re not allowed to die. Not without me.”

She waited. She hadn’t realized how used to his comebacks she’d gotten until that moment. The silence was unnerving. She tried to imagine what he would have said.

_You first._

She smiled and pulled the chair in the corner to his bedside, reaching for his hand gently. It was warm, and she sighed. _Of course it was. He’s still alive. He’ll be fine._

“You have to be fine.”

She looked around her, as if she needed to make sure they were really alone, or that she was alone, talking to herself.

“You have to be. Because… well, I’m only going to say this because you won’t be able to hold it against me, won’t be able to tease me about it. But the truth is… and it’s really probably not that much of a secret to you, probably something you know deep down. You are… my person. Not just my boss. Not my brother, a best friend, a boyfriend… not anything as ordinary and unimportant as those things. Or maybe as important as all those things put together into one person. _My_ person.”

~oOo~

_”You have to get Josh... He goes through every day worried that somebody he likes is gonna die, and it's gonna be his fault. What do you think makes him walk so fast?”_

~oOo~

Josh Lyman ran down the corridor looking for someone, anyone who spoke English and would talk to him. He’d had the fourteen hour flight to prepare him for this. Not the seeing Donna lying in a hospital bed because of him, not at the language barrier, but of the hospital itself. He hadn’t been in one since… well since he’d been shot that one time.

There had been times when he should have been in a hospital, like when his mother took a spill her first year in Florida, but he had been busy at work. When Toby’s twins were born, everyone took a minute--only the one because the world was in crisis at the time--to visit them and Andy. Not him, he had too much to do that day, and the day after, and the day after that. But he was there the day Andy came home with them. He'd made the time then. 

But now he was there in that hospital, in that country, with his heart beating out of his chest and Bach screaming in his head. He almost didn’t make it to Donna’s room before he’d lost his nerve and consciousness. Just when he was about to surrender to his own weakness and anxiety, there was a doctor talking to him, and it was in English and it sounded very reassuring, but he was talking about stents and parts of Donna’s body he’s had to open up and dig around in. Josh really did lose consciousness for a second. Thankfully the doctor caught him and propped him up, and thankfully he stopped talking about blood loss and gaping wounds.

He should have taken a moment between regaining his footing and stepping into her room, should have taken a moment to prepare himself. This time there was a chair to catch him. She was laying there so peaceful looking, like she was just sleeping. That she hadn’t been in a car that blew up, that she hadn’t been flown to a whole other continent to get the treatment she needed.

He squeezed the bridge of his nose, trying to stop the onslaught of faces swimming in his mind: Joanie, his father, the President, all the nameless, faceless people whose suffering and dying he’d played witness to while being in the White House. He put his head between his legs and breathed deep for a moment.

“Listen…” he started, bringing the chair to sit beside her bed, reaching tentatively for her hand. “I mean, well, you can’t listen… sorry, that’s just… habit. I guess I have a certain way that I speak…a cadence...” 

He scrubbed his face. “And I know I have a system and that you are… are very integral to that routine, to the way I work.”

He stood up and began pacing. “I just don’t… I don’t know how to do what I do without you. And I know… I know you want more, deserve more. I do. I’m not that self-involved… well, maybe I am. Okay, I am that self-involved, you know that. But well… I don’t want to hold you back… but… I don’t know how… I don’t know how to live without you. I can’t.”

He took a deep breath and came back to his seat, leaned over so to whisper. “I mean, look what happens when I try.”

“Not...fault…” she whispered, dry-mouthed and hoarse.

Josh bolted up to lean over her, his heart thudding in his throat and the Bach dying away. But she was already unconscious again. He sighed, running his hand lightly along her temple, tucking the stray hairs behind her ear. “Liar,” he whispered. He didn’t realize until the tears fell onto her face that he was crying.

  
~oOo~  
_”You don’t have a job, you can’t walk, or speak the language._  
You don’t have a dollar in your pocket, but you got yourself a hat.  
So, everythings fine.”  
~oOo~

Josh Lyman sat up in the hospital bed, looking down at his wife sleeping beside him. She looked wiped out and he smiled fondly. There was no Bach concerto in his head, no fear, pain or guilt. Only peace and this feeling he’d never experienced before. He imagined it must be what joy felt like. He’d never imagined he’d have that feeling in a hospital.

But, he looked over Donna still sleeping peacefully, to the little cart beside her, and the little perfection lying inside it beginning to squirm, and sighed. That’s another thing Josh never thought he’d ever have. _Family_.

He climbed slowly out of the bed so as not to disturb Donna, and tip-toed over to the cart where the baby was just beginning to wake up. He took a deep breath, reached down and slid his fingers gently under the blue blankets, pulling the infant to his chest. 

Still terrified of dropping him, Josh sat down in the comfy chair in the corner. He’d stayed at hotels that weren’t as roomy and accommodating as that hospital room. He lifted the baby to kiss him gently on the forehead. 

“This is where our lives begin, Tobias.”

The baby waved his fisted hands, waking with a roll of his head and a wail. Josh went into crisis mode, and, forgetting his fear of dropping his child, he bolted to his feet, holding the baby tight, and rushed to one of the trays where Tobias’ pacifier rested.

Donna woke. “Josh?”

“It’s okay. I have him. Go back to sleep.”

“Is he… hungry?” she asked around a yawn.

 _And I’m supposed to know that, how?_ he thought. “Let me see if this works first.”

“Uh-huh…” she mumbled, already back asleep.

Josh fit the pacifier into the baby’s mouth and moved it around until the infant’s instincts kicked in and he latched onto it and began sucking.

Josh smiled with a sigh. “Get ready to learn your first lesson in disappointment, kiddo.”

Tobias watched his father, and Josh imagined that was what settled him more than the piece of plastic in his mouth. He seemed just as fascinated with the fuzzy, out-of-focus jumble of colors and shapes that represented his father as Josh was of him.

“I have a confession, son,” he started as he walked them back to the chair. “I have _no_ idea what I am doing. I haven’t had an experience like this in a _very_ long time, this not being an expert at something.” He leaned down to whisper. “And I’m terrified.”

“Now, I know that’s not an emotion you’ve experienced yet, and I’m going to do my best to try and keep it away from you for a _very_ long time. Because there is a lot of terrible, horrific things out there, and for so long, your mommy and I, doing what we do for a living, where we sit first row to a lot of the suffering of the world, and we thought bringing a child into it was… well, was the very worst ideas.

“But then, from the most unlikely of people, we were forced to see it another way. Your namesake, Toby, showed us that the only thing that triumphs over hate, that triumphs over anger, rage and fear was that every night he got to come home and see what it was he was fighting and persevering for. 

“Now, you’re going to hear some things about this Toby, some of them not that great. It’s true, he was, from time to time, an asshole-- _sorry_ \--and sometimes he was a little ball of rage and sanctimony. But, he was also the most secretly kind hearted, giving person you’d ever meet. When he loved someone, respected someone, he’d go to the end of the world to make them happy.

“Some of those best qualities didn’t reveal themselves until after he had children of his own. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to name you Toby; to remind me that you are the best of me. Also though, to honor my friend, and through him, my very closest group of friends who were (some still are) the closest thing to family I ever had. The people who changed my life.

“The people and the time of my life when I met and slowly, oh so slowly fell in love with your mommy.” He looked over to the bed where Donna was lying. Awake now and smiling with tears running down her face. He got up and came to the side of the bed, taking her hand with his free one.

“Maybe with that name, Tobias, you’ll be as lucky as we were back then, as lucky as we are now.”

**Author's Note:**

> Beta read by the lovely that is Ragdoll. All remaining mistakes are all mine.


End file.
